Archaeological Geology
The Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the Moss Bennett Act of 1974 revolutionized the number and scope of archaeological investigations in the United States and its territories. During the last decade this upsurge in activity has spread to archaeological geology involved with cultural-resource management issues.
Under the Historic Preservation Act, federal agencies are required to take into account the effects of their activities on historic (and prehistoric) cultural resources. This requirement pertains to all activities involving federal funds and sets up the need and justification for cultural resource surveys in project areas where the cultural-resource base has not been documented. The Moss Bennett Act, on the other hand, required federal agencies to mitigate the impacts of their activities on known significant cultural resources. Together these two pieces of legislation have fostered a burgeoning cultural-resource management industry by providing the requirement and funding sources for investigations across then nation.
Archaeological geologists have become increasingly involved in the interpretation of the physical stratigraphy, sedimentology, and pedology of archaeological site-mitigation projects in using this information to reconstruct prehistoric environments. Rolfe Mandel (University of Nebraska, Omaha) reported on important ongoing mitigation in the lower Medina River near San Antonio, Texas, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in San Diego. Mandel and his archaeologists colleagues are investigating a 15-meter thick sequence of alluvial deposits representing all of the major cultural periods of the Holocene and terminal Pleistocene. The locality also contains pedological and biotic records that promise to provide a detailed environmental history of the last 11,000 years.
As cultural-resource management investigations have extended to all elements of the landscape, archaeologists have become increasingly aware that parts of the archaeological record are buried and not easily located with standard methods. Much of this awareness has come from archaeological group investigations. Several recent studies funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service, and the transportation departments of states in the upper Midwest and Great Plains have included archaeological geology investigations aimed at assessing the potential for buried archaeological deposits. Results of these studies suggest that the record of the human past has been removed by natural processes from some areas; in others it is preserved by buried, and therefore not part of the present pool of archaeological information. Knowledge of both of these circumstances is essential for accurate interpretation of the known record of the human past.
The economic advantage of archaeology geology approaches to cultural-resource management studies has been realized by both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Soil conservation Service. When developing management plans and designing projects in the upper Midwest, both agencies use archaeological geology studies to avoid areas that have high potential for buried cultural resources. This allows the agencies to protect cultural resources and avoid high mitigation costs and discovery situations during construction.
Several state and federal agencies changed with managing natural resources have begun to use archaeological geology overviews of their management areas to facilitate long-range cultural-resource management plans. In January 1991, R. Christopher Godwin and Associates, Inc. (New Orleans) submitted an assessment of cultural resources in the Louisiana coastal zone to the Coastal Management Division of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. The report outlines the Quaternary geology and geomorphology of the coastal zone, stressing the effects that physiography, chronology, and geomorphic processes have had on the archaeological record.
The inevitable problem of standardizing field methods and reporting has risen with the upswing in cultural-resource management-related archaeological geology. This problem is related, in part, to the diversity of earth science disciplines that do archaeological geology. At its 1991 summer meeting, the Association of Iowa Archaeologists became the first association of professional archaeologists to adopt detailed guidelines for cultural-resource management-associated archaeological geology investigations. The guidelines outline the role of earth-science studies in cultural-resource management projects and provide standards for such work to foster results that are widely usable. Also, the guidelines provide agencies contracting for archaeological geology with information about what should be expected from these investigations. This permits drafting of more explicit requests for proposals and scopes of work, which greatly facilitate the review process.
Cultural-resource investigations will provide the funding source for an increasing number of local and regional archaeological geology studies. The importance of these projects to the progress of discipline was very evident at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in San Diego. All the presentations in the Archaeological Geology Division’s symposium on the archaeological geology of the Archaic Period in North America contained information obtained primarily from cultural-resource management studies. The development of new techniques for locating buried cultural resources and the formulation of detailed landscape evolution and human habitation models are two frontiers facing archaeologists and archaeological geologists.